


everything in its season

by Anonymous



Category: A3! (Video Game)
Genre: Gardening, M/M, all banri wants is a second chance and maybe a safe home for his otp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 00:12:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12544444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Flowers wither. Luckily for Banri, they bloom again.(in which tsumugi disappears and banri becomes a gardener)





	everything in its season

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Contains some descriptions of worms because of the gardening theme and also several other reasons.

Tsumugi’s flowers are in full bloom. In the three weeks since he disappeared, the rows of pale green buds have unfurled into splashes of colour, blue-pink-yellow sweeping relentlessly across the garden. Banri spent enough time watching Tsumugi crouched over them to know each one by name; it’s impossible to go outside now without seeing the roses tilt in greeting and remembering.

He thinks he’s the only one who remembers, sometimes. The rest of the company is wrapped up in a host of other matters; life goes on, as Sakyo puts it, though even he’s been looking increasingly haggard over the past few days. Understandably, they’re preoccupied with more practical matters – they’ve no time to look at a garden when they can’t even find its caretaker. So Banri takes it upon himself to pick up where Tsumugi left off, keeping the soil moist and the leaves green, and even though Tsumugi had never ever let Banri touch the orchids while he was around, Banri supposes that he’ll be forgiven just this once.

One of the cosmos beckons to him. Banri stops in front of it and rubs a leaf between his fingers. Tsumugi used to do the same, eyes closed, humming softly under his breath with a huge wide-brimmed hat shading half his face. He always looked ridiculous with it strapped securely around his chin by Tasuku, tottering occasionally under its unexpected weight. The fragments of song he sang stitch easily together in Banri’s mind.

_What’s that?_ he’d asked, the first time he’d heard, and Tsumugi had blushed, waving his hands in front of his face, yelping _I didn’t realise!_ while the sun lit up his skin, sparkled in his eyes. Banri had laughed until he’d fallen off his ledge, spilling coffee all over the grass, and then it had been Tsumugi’s turn to gasp in amusement, the flowers around him trembling in time with the shake of his shoulders.

This particular cosmos hadn’t budded yet at the time. “You’ve grown up,” Banri tells it, the way he thinks Tsumugi might have. It sways at him in response, but as he goes to tip his watering can over it the leaves rustle menacingly. The entire plant dips, narrowly dodging the streams of water carousing through the air. When Banri goes to right it, he notices an unexpected shimmer among the branches.

There’s a worm on Tsumugi’s cosmos.

For one long, incredibly tempting moment, Banri wants nothing more than to take his spade and slice the thing in half. Banri never got to run his hands over the flowers while Tsumugi was around, and now here’s this worm doing whatever it pleases with Tsumugi’s plant. He’s not jealous of a worm, but it does feel somewhat unfair.

Instinct stops him, or rather, some half-forgotten memory tugging at his mind. _That’s gross,_ he sees himself say, shrinking away from Tsumugi’s outstretched glove.

_They’re good for the soil_ , Tsumugi had told him, letting the worm wriggle away into the grass. _They make tunnels underneath, you know, around the roots. It helps the air and the water get to them._

Banri looks at the worm again. The worm doesn’t look back, because it’s an ugly, squirmy thing with no eyes. But he thinks of it nestling under Tsumugi’s plants, helping them breathe where nobody can see its work, and suddenly it looks a little different, after all.

*

He calls the worm Mu-mu, because it's the sort of thing Tsumugi would have done. He soon regrets his decision, because now that he's given it a name he's started to grow attached to it, even though Mu-mu does nothing but zoom through all of Tsumugi's best plants. The worm seems to know each of their stem structures by heart, better even that Banri. Watching it scurry through the leaves reminds him of how Tsumugi had looked darting from one bush to the other, tugging Banri along to describe each of them in excruciating detail. _This one buds in May,_ Tsumugi tells him, in the clear voice that makes him captivating on-stage. _It needs to grow at a basic pH, so you can't plant it near the others, see –_

Banri doesn't remember the details of that particular conversation, but Tsumugi's radiant expression is embedded in his memory. Banri loves the way Tsumugi's whole expression brightens when he talks, transforming his features, making him look younger even than Banri.

A slight pressure against his spade jolts him out of his thoughts. He looks down, and for the second time in two days he almost – almost – brings his spade down over the head of an ugly but potentially helpful animal. This worm comes with a fragment of dead leaf on his head, almost like a hat complete with tiny wig. It headbutts him three more times before zooming over to join its friend. Or – maybe not its friend, because Mu-mu wriggles at it for a few seconds in the way Banri's come to recognize as the happy Mu-mu way before shooing it off the leaf. Do worms kiss? It is entirely possible that Banri is just reading too much into this situation, but there's something frankly suspicious about the way those two worms wriggle around one another.

He dubs the new one Ugly-with-good-fashion because he can't be bothered thinking of a name, but the leaf hat deserves points for effort. Banri wonders what Mu-mu thinks of it. Banri used to make Tsumugi model each of the new hats he bought, just to see how different they looked on someone else. Tsumugi protested some of them, of course; he claimed caps pressed his fringe down so he couldn't see. Obviously that meant nothing more than an invitation for Banri to force it on him, holding Tsumugi's slender arms still and jamming the cap onto his head. Tsumugi smells fresh in Banri's memory, struggling against him with no real force. In his mind he pulls him closer, holding Tsumugi there so he can hear his heart beat, so he can feel the rise and fall of Tsumugi's chest in time with his own.

_I should have treasured him more_ , Banri thinks, struck by an intense pang of want. He had so many opportunities to see Tsumugi, to touch him, to hear his voice, and for once in his life Banri is glad of his ability to take things in without really being conscious of it – but it's not enough. He should have paid more attention. He could have made more of an effort to truly commit those memories to heart. Maybe then he'd have been able to convince Tsumugi to stay home that night. _I'm only going to the convenience store_ , Tsumugi's gentle voice echoes. He ruffles Banri's hair, smiling gently. _You're just like Tasuku, the way you worry so much_.

Banri drops his spade and falls back onto the grass. It's bright outside. He looks up at the sky to watch the clouds spin and it's so wide it's dizzying. He puts his arm over his eyes to shield them from the sun, or from anyone watching, and then he doesn't move for a very long time.

*

When he finally gets up, Mu-mu and Ugly are sitting on his spade. They crawl round in circles when they feel him move, almost as if they were worried about him. "Get off, you two," Banri laughs, nudging his spade at the dirt gently, and they roll off onto the soil, scurrying back together like they're magnetically attracted. Banri watches them curl around one another in comforting spirals.

"At least some of us aren't lonely," he sighs. His voice falls soft into the silence, but the flowers tremble, just slightly, like a thousand tiny nods of acknowledgement.

*

The one thing that thrums under his skin, that keeps him sane, is the way Tasuku had looked the night of Tsumugi’s disappearance – harrowed and distressed, but not despairing. _Tsumugi wouldn't just leave_ , he’d said, voice steady. _Not this time_. As much as it rankles at Banri that he hadn’t been the one to say it, he knows it wouldn’t have sounded half as convincing from his mouth. The words still aren’t actually that comforting because they don’t rule out any of the more horrifying possibilities; Tsumugi could have been kidnapped, or injured. He could be lying somewhere half-conscious, barely alive, wondering why nobody had come looking for him.

Banri sighs at the petunias. Without Tsumugi around, it’s like there are ants crawling under his skin, picking at his veins so he can’t keep calm. He’s itching for a fight but he can’t muster up the energy to lift a hand; he’s desperate for quiet but the silence is stifling. He’s lost and adrift, dried-out petals scattered in the wind. To think that the absence of a single person could make him feel this way.

"Banri-san, you've changed."

He blinks at the voice. Muku is looking at him with clear, concerned eyes.

"Eh?"

"You've changed," Muku says again, grasping at the air with his hands as if searching for words only he can see. "I mean, not in a bad way! You look softer. Or, not softer, but – ah, I don't know what I'm saying! I'm sorry, you don't have to listen to a tiny insignificant beansprout like me – "

"Nobody said anything like that about you," Banri tells him sternly.

Muku reddens and twists his hands together. “I-If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know!” He bows at the end, almost knocking into Banri’s chest, and rushes off to talk to Hyodo in overloud tones. Without the strangely forceful pressure of Muku’s wide eyes upon him, Banri tilts his head back to consider his recent behaviour more closely. He’d thought he was coping reasonably well, but he’s clearly made a blunder somewhere along the way if he’s gotten Muku worried.

“Alright,” he says, to nobody in particular. “Gotta rethink my strategy.”

He slides open the door and steps out into the garden, but instead of heading straight for the tools, he takes his phone out of his pocket. Tsumugi-san had never quite figured out the camera settings, but it’s all too easy for Banri, who snaps a few award-winning shots in a matter of seconds before coming to rest in front of the matthiola. These won’t bloom for a few weeks yet, but they’re fresh and verdant, brimming with potential, and Banri can’t help spending a little more time framing the blades against the clear blue sky on his screen. He’ll probably have to crop most of the photos later, and they’ll look nicer with a filter, but there’s something about the colours in this last one that gives him the sense he’ll be leaving it unaltered.

With a small sigh, he stabs his spade into the grass – and promptly yanks it out again, horrified. Mu-mu is curling in lazily right beside the gash in the grass Banri has just made. It has no idea how close it’s come to certain death, and it’s not that Banri is attached to the worm or anything, but his heart is thumping, fast, and his throat is dry and parched. His hands are shaking around the spade, he realises. It’s a complete overreaction, and yet – something clicks for him, then.

Life is so fragile.

There’s this strange dance that Mu-mu does, some kind of sideways crawl, that reminds Banri of Tsumugi when they’d done a Street ACT outside the ice-cream parlour. They’d been working in the setting of a barren desert because the heat had been particularly stifling that day, and Tsumugi had decided to play, of all things, a snake looking for a rock to call home. Banri had always found it amazing, the way Tsumugi grew bold in a character’s skin.

Ugly-with-good-fashion has a strange dance too, one which involves less sideways motion and more circular; he orbits Mu-mu with a fierce protectiveness that causes even the crows above to peer dubiously at them before hopping off in search of easier lunch. Part of that might also be due to Banri’s angry shovel waving, but he figures Ugly deserves a bit of credit for Mu-mu’s safety, too. Nevertheless, Banri notes that he often sees Mu-mu alone, too, sliding through the leaves free and unrestricted. He is almost definitely giving Ugly too much credit, but still he wonders: doesn’t Ugly worry? If Banri’s shovel had fallen a few millimetres to the right, Mu-mu might never have found their way back home.

Mu-mu wriggles again. If worms could smile, Banri thinks Mu-mu would be glowing right now, beaming under the sun and the crisp air. It wouldn’t be fair to keep Mu-mu underground, he admits to himself, watching the way the worm snuggles up to the stalks.

_It wasn’t your fault_ , Tsumugi’s soft voice tells him. Banri knows this.

*

In another world, in another lifetime, Banri wakes up to Tsumugi snuggling under his arm. When he yelps in surprise, Tsumugi presses a finger to his lips. _Shh_ , he says, while Banri is still struggling with the sensation of soft skin against his mouth. _It’s our little secret_.

Tsumugi has a thousand and one secrets for every member of the troupe, but the only ones Banri cares for are the ones that Tsumugi shares with him. Small secrets, like a drop of spilled coffee over afternoon tea, or an awkward typo in a text message, but also the ones left unspoken – the slight heat in Tsumugi’s hands when they accidentally brush Banri’s across the table, or the miniscule time delay between when Banri looks up and Tsumugi looks away. These are the secrets that Banri keeps to himself, even as they eat away at him from the inside, bursting with potential that’s destined only to wither now.

In this world, Tsumugi’s flowers droop and wither. There comes a day when Banri stops seeing worms with little matching leaf hats curled around each other near the anemones. The photos he takes are pushed back further up his screen, displaced by the rows of new colour preserved as thousands of tiny pixels. When Tsumugi comes home, Banri will show him the seasons as they pass. He’ll take Tsumugi to see the garden, one, two, three years older but still healthy and growing, and then he’ll take out his phone. Maybe he’ll have a new model by then. Maybe Tsumugi will know how to work the camera app.

In this world, it takes another four months before Tsumugi’s flowers start to perk up again. Banri catches a glimpse of movement amongst the shrubbery and thinks he sees the hint of a hardworking garden helper and their much uglier counterpart. “Welcome back,” he murmurs, heart squeezing a little at the sight.

“I’m back,” Tsumugi says from behind him, shy and a little confused, and Banri turns, leaps up, drops his spade with zero regard for any possible worms underfoot.

This time, this time –


End file.
